1:14 pm

Thu April 3, 2014

Viking's Choice: Behold, Noneuclid's Confounding Thrash Alchemy

When you can count the director of the Wagner Festival and Tom G. Warrior (the mastermind behind metal behemoths Celtic Frost and Triptykon) among your supporters, you must be doing something right. After all, classical music and metal aren't all that different — both can be bombastic, complex pieces of music high on drama, to put it lightly. The Bavarian metal band Noneuclid knows a thing or two about both, having participated in genre-crossingperformances to tremendous acclaim. On its second album, Metatheosis, there are no strings shrieking at the heavens, but, oh, the thrash alchemy is something to behold. Speaking of which, behold "The Black Plague of the Soul."

There's a little bit of everything here — clustered voices out of the psychedelic sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a mud-clod caveman riff followed by a grunted pinch harmonic, a clean-cut blast-beat that sometimes subdivides the trudge. When your band includes members of the tech-death outfit Obscura, the melodically driven black-metal group Dark Forest and the indescribable Triptykon, you're bound to confound metal standards. Still, on an album of mindbogglingly excellent technical frip-frappery, "The Black Plague of the Soul" is Noneuclid in its most aggro South of Heaven mode.